This week’s Newsweek cover story is about male depression.  Great.

I am still deciding whether my depression is more like Churchill and Lincoln or more like Hemingway and Robert Lowell.  Maybe Styron and maybe Mike Wallace.  I don’t like pain, so Van Gogh is out.

Who knew being moody and irritable was so damn chic?

I always thought it was more than a little inconvenient to go through life as if each day were a burden, an imposition, an inconvenience, a rather brutal punishment.  Now, I find out it’s what all the cool guys are doing.

Turns out there are a lot of new treatments for male depression.  You can’t get ‘em yet because it’s all experimental, but they are coming on line.  Good news for those of us who put “suicide” on our calendar for 2012, but if it’s a bit more urgent … well … there’s always electroconvulsive shock therapy.  Thomas Eagleton and all you know.  That image you have of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, just forget about that.

In the meantime, you can have some great drugs that will keep you from being quite so far down in the dumps.  Of course, your libido will be sleeping with the Fido in the doghouse.  You won’t actually be happy, you understand.  Zombie like is one description I’ve heard, but “happy”, well, …. uhm … nope.

Behavioralists have been in vogue the past couple of decades in the talk therapy arena.  It’s a great gig.  You tell them your problems, they tell you attitude is everything, move along, the bill will be in the mail.  You can try some other form if you like.  Keep a notebook by your bed and record your dreams.  Get hypnotized into infant recollections of trauma.  Or, you just might try a VooDoo witch.  I’m not always quite so sure that there’s all that much difference between an African Shaman who reads entrails and divines dreams and the American psychiatrist/psychologist.  Well, the African charges a straight up one time fee of a cow and the American charges $125/hour for the rest of your life and, as a result the American dresses better.

I took the fun online test for depression offered as a link from the online Newsweek articles.  It was great.  It told me that I should immediately go to an emergency room and check myself in, seek hard drugs and a size 40 long straight jacket.  Turns out that not every Rohrschach image is a knife wound or a fresh branding burn on the private parts of nuns and Republicans.

Who knew?

So, what do you think?  Just when I’m grousing about being depressed, along comes this Newsweek coverage of male depression.  Is that Jungian synchronicity?  Irony?  Coincidence? 

by the way, today was a great day.  Worked hard, billed hours, was productive at my desk and here at home.  Had the top down, washed the car in the sunny 70-degrees.  Last night, significantly advanced the ball on my income tax project.   I can’t explain me.  It’s confusing in here, too.

blogblah!!!